Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Chait: Can We Start Taking Political Correctness Seriously Now?

Chait, right on the money as is so often the case.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

That video is quite disturbing. The jamming up in someone's face and then saying "Get out of my personal space." Pushing a someone around while saying "We're not pushing, we are just walking forward." These are the tactics of a bullying 12 your old. And the little smirk on some of the student's faces while they deal out a little humiliation to a thin Asian kid, under color of racial justice no less... It's repulsive.

It's hard work to get past the disgust to notice the telling details (this hard work of overcoming strong emotions to observe something dispassionately is, frankly, not my job), but rewatch the video and check out how the "protestors" are organized: Ring of undergraduates doing the whole we're-not-pushing thing. Behind them, spaced evenly, four people about in their 30's, who are the ones issuing the orders to the student journalist to leave. Why are they behind the pushing line? Doesn't the line need all the mass it can get? These people are clearly university faculty or staff, who very well know that if they pushed an undergraduate they could be fired and sued. So, they keep behind the student line and issue orders to the journalist kid and then, when he won't comply, they issue orders to the line of undergrads to do the pushing. Finally, in the middle of the circle, well in the rear, an identified professor, shouting out generalized orders to all journalists to leave and to the undergraduates, whom she addresses as "Students!" Finally, when the person taking the video penetrates the ring and approached the professor, she calls for "muscle" to have him expelled.

So, what we have is a group purporting to be a grass roots movement of black undergraduates... Actively organized in a hierarchical, practically military, fashion by faculty/staff, with a middle-aged white professor the one apparently in charge. How weird that "ConcernedStudents1950" have list of demands for faculty hiring, committees, additional staffing of student centers rather than, say, HS rank-based admissions or lower tuition.

12:35 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Does this look like a list of student demands?

Sorry, I had to come back to it. Watching that damned video has made me so angry I gave myself a headache. And it's not the bullying of the student journalist, or the surrealism of assaulting people while shouting that they are committing assault... It's the deeper surrealism of cynical faculty/staff self dealing under the guise of justice, of undergraduates being trained as administrative toadies while being told they're fighting for liberation, and of minority students subject to institutions designed keep them fearful, angry, and weak and which profess to be for their specific benefit. This is the most squalid cynicism disguised as ideology, cynicism of near Putin levels, and it appears to be the ideology of a significant chunk the university.

4:10 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

I'm 100% with you, A.
Your observations seem right on target to me.
I still haven't made it all the way through that video it's pissed me off so bad.
Really...it's just off the damn scale...

4:36 PM  

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